Workers Are Consumers Too

Since Taking Office, President Joe Biden has sought to position himself as an ally of working Americans. His administration is enacting what it calls a “worker-centric” trade policy, and the president scarcely seems to give a public address without mentioning the importance of union jobs.

- By Eric Boehm

“You’re a gigantic reason why I’m standing here—standing here today as your president,” Biden said in a June keynote address at the AFL-CIO annual convention in Philadelphia. “I owe you. From the very beginning of my running for office, back when I was a kid, it was labor, the unions.”

Yet despite all he believes he owes American laborers, Biden’s economic policies are punishing them as consumers.

Consider that supposedly workercentric trade policy. Biden has left in place many of the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, including the levies on aluminum and steel. By artificially hiking the price of imported steel, those tariffs are supposed to boost domestic production, creating more and better-paying steelworker jobs. But the cost of the tariffs rebounds onto every industry that uses steel to make other products. While about 57,000 Americans work in steelmaking jobs, more than 12 million are employed in manufacturing jobs that use steel. The tariffs hurt those workers.